McCain swings at White House over '09 leak to Sanger

8/1/12 1:25 PM EDT

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) believes he's found a smoking gun showing that President Barack Obama's White House leaks national security secrets to New York Times reporter David Sanger.

In a Senate floor speech Wednesday afternoon calling for a special prosecutor to probe such leaks, McCain pointed to a 2009 episode in Pittsburgh discussed by Sanger in his book released in June, Confront and Conceal.

"According to ... Sanger, ‘a senior official in the National Security Council’ tapped him on the shoulder and brought him to the presidential suite in the Pittsburgh hotel where President Obama was staying, and where ‘most of the rest of the national security staff was present.’ There, the journalist was apparently allowed to review satellite images and other ‘evidence’ that confirmed the existence of a secret nuclear site in Iran," McCain said. "I wonder how many people have the key to the presidential suite in a Pittsburgh, Pa. hotel. You might want to start there."

McCain added in a statement e-mailed to reporters: "Has the official who made that invitation to Mr. Sanger been identified and interviewed? Has every staffer in that room been interviewed? What do they know about what the reporter described or about any other similar communications of classified or national-security sensitive information to the media? How could something like that have happened without the National Security Advisor knowing anything about it? Has he been interviewed?"

It was last September in Pittsburgh, when about 20 journalists were attending an off-the-record dinner with Obama chief of staff Rahm Emanuel during the G-20 summit. Also in attendance: New York Times Chief Washington Correspondent David Sanger, a White House favorite.

As one White House reporter tells it, "[then-National Security Adviser] Jim Jones and Denis McDonough and [NSC anti-proliferation official] Gary Samore were lurking in this very dark, nice dining room that we were in. And we were all kind of wondering why they were there. Then, at one point at the dinner, McDonough tapped on Sanger's shoulder and whispered something in his ear. Sanger got up and walked towards this clutch of NSC people, including Jones, and they walked off."

"We were all flummoxed and floored by this whole thing," said the reporter. "A few reporters cornered McDonough and said, 'You can't do that. You can't do that in front of other reporters.' He said, 'Oh, you guys, you're barking up the wrong tree! We didn't give anything. You've got nothing to worry about.'”

But later that night, Sanger posted a blockbuster scoop: As Obama, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and French President Nicolas Sarkozy would announce the next morning, the Iranians had a secret nuclear site but kept it hidden for years from the International Atomic Energy Agency. The other reporters — Sanger’s dinner companions earlier — were sent scrambling at around midnight to match the Times’s account.

“I don’t have a great recollection of the timing of all those events. ... It was obviously at the end of a long week” of meetings, McDonough told POLITICO. “I probably didn’t have dinner with anyone that night.”

Sanger doesn’t dispute that the White House confirmed the Iran story, but he had earlier written about suspicions of such a site in his book "Inheritance," and he says he put "urgent" questions to officials earlier that day after learning that Iran had abruptly disclosed a new site in a letter to the IAEA.

The Pittsburgh episode clearly shows that Sanger is very chummy with White House national security officials. That's no shock. It also shows that aides sometimes spoon-feed stories to selected reporters. But whether it shows that those officials give those reporters classified information is far from clear.

Presumably by the time Sanger was pulled aside, the White House had decided to reveal to the public the intelligence on the Iran nuclear site. So that information wasn't classified. It's possible Sanger saw and heard some things in the hotel suite that went beyond what was publicly disclosed the next morning. However, it should also be remembered that the National Security Adviser has the authority to declassify information and that anyone acting on the direct order of the president can likely do just about anything he tells that person to do with respect to classified information.

The Obama administration pulled a similar stunt with release of the intelligence gathered in the raid that killed bin Laden. Selected reporters were given a look at the intelligence after it had been declassified, but before it was made available to the entire press corps and the public. In both cases, the White House probably thought the advance peeks would get the stories out in a sympathetic and/or well-informed way.

UPDATE 2 (Wednesday, 6:07 P.M.): National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor e-mails: "If the people writing these press releases had read Mr. Sanger’s book, they’d know it says he ‘had an early hint of the Qom discovery in the summer of 2008’ during the Bush administration. Sanger goes on to write that in 2009, he was told by a ‘diplomat in Europe’ that the Iranians knew their secret facility had been discovered and were rushing to disclose it to the IAEA to avoid an international rebuke. That’s why the President, along with [then-British Prime Minister Gordon] Brown and [then-French President Nicolas] Sarkozy, disclosed to the world that the US, UK, and France had presented detailed evidence to the IAEA demonstrating that the Islamic Republic of Iran had been building a covert uranium enrichment facility near Qom for several years. That disclosure was then leveraged to push through tough new international sanctions on Iran. Senator McCain should not omit or distort these key facts to make a political attack.”

Sanger also writes in his book what he told POLITICO in 2010, that he'd been pestering U.S. officials with questions about the issue after getting a tip from elsewhere that the Iranians had acknowledged the site to the IAEA after getting wind that the IAEA, the U.S. and others had learned of the off-the-books facility at Qom.

UPDATE 3 (Wednesday, 6:21 P.M.): Sanger e-mails: "As I described in 'Confront and Conceal,'' during the summits in New York and Pittsburgh in 2009, I received a call from a diplomat in Europe who told me that the Iranians had gotten wind of the fact that their secret new facility near Qum had been discovered and rushed a letter to the International Atomic Energy Agency. While vaguely worded, the letter admitted they were building a previously-undisclosed enrichment plant. I began to make calls to administration officials, who initially told me they would not discuss the subject. When it became clear to them that I was writing the story anyway, and that it would pre-empt the President's planned announcement, they decided to brief me. I posted the news on the Times website, because the last editions of the paper had already completed their run.
President Obama, of course, announced the discovery of the faciility the next morning, and several administration officials held a large briefing for the traveling press corps. Clearly, whatever they announced so publicly that day had been declassified somewhere along the line.''